," he said. "You are your father's daughter."

He brooded somberly.

"It was not," he said, "what I had expected--that meager following.
Who _were_ there? Not two--not three--and there should have been an
army of us."

He squared himself and faced the invisible as if he led the van.

That and his attitude drew Burton down on to him.

"Was there ever an army," he asked dangerously, "of 'us'?"

Wrackham looked at Burton (it was the first time he'd taken the
smallest notice of him) with distinct approval, as if the young man
had suddenly shown more ability than he had given him credit for.
But you don't suppose he'd seen the irony in him. Not he!

"You're right," he said. "Very right. All the same, there ought to
have been more there besides Myself."

There was a perfectly horrible silence, and then Antigone's voice
came through it, pure and fine and rather slow.

"There couldn't be. There couldn't really be anybody--there--_at
all_. He stood alone."

And with her wonderful voice there went a look, a look of
intelligence, as wonderful, as fine and pure. It went straight to
Burton. It was humble, and yet there was a sort of splendid pride
about it. And there was no revolt, mind you, no disloyalty in it;
the beauty of the thing was that it didn't set her father down; it
left him where he was, as high as you please, as high as his vogue
could lift him. Ford Lankester was beyond him only because he was
beyond them all.

And yet we wondered how he'd take it.

He took it as if Antigone had been guilty of a social blunder; as if
her behavior had been in some way painful and improper. That's to
say he took no notice of it at all beyond shifting his seat a little
so as to screen her. And then he spoke--exclusively to us.

"I came," he said, "partly because I felt that, for all Lankester's
greatness, _this_--" (his gesture indicated us all sitting there in
our mourning)--"_this_ was the last of him. It's a question whether
he'll ever mean much to the next generation. There's no doubt that
he limited his public--wilfully. He alienated the many. And, say
what you like, the judgment of posterity is not the judgment of the
few." There was a faint murmur of dissent (from Furnival), but
Wrackham's voice, which had gathered volume, rolled over it. "Not
for the novelist. Not for the painter of contemporary life."

He would have kept it up interminably on those lines and on that
scale, but that Antigone created a diversion